With trembling hands, I untied the faded blue\u00a0ribbon holding the first bundle of letters together.\u00a0 Forgetting to put on my archiver’s cotton gloves, I delved into the one on top; a folded piece of parchment paper, water marked and stained with what looked like splotches of tar.\u00a0 It had been sealed, in fact, with a\u00a0well-placed drop of bubbling\u00a0tar, as if from the deck of a ship.\u00a0 Although I was sure this was a literary hoax, I delved in, anxious for a diversion from my research, which had grown quite tedious.<\/p>\n
The date was unreadable, a mere blur of ink engulfed in a water mark.\u00a0 Below the date I could make out the letters HMS<\/strong> but the ship’s name was smudged beyond recognition.\u00a0 My eyes flew to the body of the letter.<\/p>\n Dear Jane,<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n How to begin?\u00a0 How to introduce myself to my own sister, by birth?\u00a0 A sister\u00a0who should know me well and have tender feelings for\u00a0me,\u00a0but for our parent’s\u00a0neglect.\u00a0 Perhaps you do have some recollection of my birth?\u00a0 Or have you convenientlly forgot, along with the others?\u00a0 The way you forgot our poor George.\u00a0 And Aunt Lenora, for that matter.\u00a0 Out of sight, out of mind,\u00a0it worked well for our family, did it not?\u00a0 Then again, there were so very many of us…\u00a0 Mother and father were forced to chuse which ones to give their attentions to.\u00a0 I (being the third girl, and\u00a0painful to look at) was easy to forget.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n I was told by my foster mother that I was born in January of 1778, a healthy pink female, bald as a billiard, my face covered with stork bites.\u00a0 After three months at the breast mother dearest\u00a0put me out with them, John and Elizabeth Littleworth (their surname tells it all, does it not?\u00a0 England’s\u00a0under-valued people, the poor-to-middling, the backbone of our great nation) near two miles away at a Cheesedown farmhouse near\u00a0Deane. Here I thrived.\u00a0 Or, at least, I survived.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Mother farmed you out too, dear sis, to the very same family.\u00a0 But you,\u00a0she came back for, once you were out of nappies and past the mewling, puking, bawling stage.\u00a0 Me, she quite forgot.\u00a0 At least, I prefer to think she simply forgot me.\u00a0 Unlike our brother George, who was placed elsewhere because he was dim-witted and had embarassing fits of some sort.\u00a0 And Edward, lucky Edward, but\u00a0we’ll speak of him later. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Like you, sister Jane, I\u00a0lived my first years in the Littleworth’s\u00a0thatched-roof hovel on the Cheesedown, near Deane;\u00a0a noisy, mud-floored\u00a0tenant farmhouse crowded with\u00a0kids of all ages.\u00a0 That’s how my foster mother supplemented her husband’s meagre earnings, minding the brats of\u00a0more well-to-do families.\u00a0 Because our father was the parson,\u00a0dear Mrs. Littleworth probably hoped to gain a little influence with\u00a0the Almighty.\u00a0 I cannot help but wonder, since they never came for me, if I was not my father’s daughter, afterall.\u00a0\u00a0 Or p’raps I was my father’s daughter, but not\u00a0out of the loins of our dear mother.\u00a0 \u00a0But that’s a scandelous thing to say about one’s birth parents.\u00a0 I prefer to think they\u00a0simply\u00a0mislaid me, like a stocking lost under the bed.\u00a0 And who cares? For what good is a daughter, except to match up and marry off to a wealthy family?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But an ugly girl is so difficult to foist off –unless she comes with a nice dowry.\u00a0\u00a0Yet ugly has served me well, as you shall see.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n I write you, hoping you might write a story about me, dearest sister.\u00a0 It’s a\u00a0lurid tale, one that\u00a0Defoe and Cleland would be envious of.\u00a0\u00a0 Your brothers are not the only ones who went to sea for their li\u00a0<\/strong> <\/em><\/p>\n The remaining sentence and last paragraph on the page is washed out and unreadable.\u00a0 At the very bottom of the page I can make out a closing and signature:<\/p>\n Your forgotten sister, etc. etc.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Lizzie, a.k.a. Carlisle Littleworth Austen<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Copyright 2013 by\u00a0Linda Collison<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With trembling hands, I untied the faded blue\u00a0ribbon holding the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[252],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lost-letters-of-lizzie-austen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1657"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1675,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657\/revisions\/1675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madhatdesign.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}